2007 Top Stories

VIMS Professor Jeffrey Shields receives a 5-year, $2.4 million federal grant to study how fishing pressure and declines in water quality affect the emergence and spread of a blue crab disease in the seaside bays of Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

A team including researchers from VIMS reports that episodic, swirling current systems known as eddies act to pump nutrients up from the deep ocean to fuel blooms of algae in otherwise barren mid-ocean regions.

Norfolk Southern Corporation has committed $150,000 to VIMS to help purchase an Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometer, an instrument that provides new opportunities for addressing important questions in marine ecology and conservation.